In his sci-fi film Inception (2010), Christophe Nolan imagined his protagonist slipping into other people’s dreams and even shaping their contents. But what if this story wasn’t so far away from real life? Our research suggests that it is possible to interact with volunteers while they are asleep, and even to converse with them at certain key moments.
The scientific study of dreams
- Research shows we remember on average one to three dreams per week.
- However, not everyone is equal when it comes to recalling dreams.
- Whether people remember their dreams depends on many factors such as gender (women remember their dreams more frequently than men), one’s interest in dreams, as well as the way dreams are collected (some might find it handy to keep track of them with a “dream journal” or a recorder, for example).
- The private and fleeting nature of dreams makes it tricky for scientists to capture them.
- Moreover, to understand what happens in the brain while dreaming – and what purpose this activity serves – we would need to be able to compare brain activity during times when dreams occur with those when they are absent.
- It is therefore imperative to determine precisely when dreams occur in order to further the science of dreams.
Lucid dreaming
- Lucid dreamers, on the other hand, have the unique ability to remain aware of the dreaming process during REM sleep, a stage of sleep during which brain activity is closer to that of the waking phase.
- The existence of lucid dreaming has been known since ancient times, but for a long time it was considered esoteric and unworthy of scientific exploration.
- These two researchers set out to prove that lucid dreamers were indeed asleep when they realised they were dreaming.
- It is now possible to combine such experiments with brain imaging techniques to study the brain regions involved in lucid dreaming.
From fiction to reality: talking to the dreamer
- In other words, is it possible to talk to a lucid dreamer?
- To find out, we exposed a lucid dreamer to tactile stimuli while he was asleep.
- But the fact that they sometimes did (18% of cases in our study) opened a communication channel between experimenters and dreamers.
- However, lucid dreaming remains a rare phenomenon and even lucid dreamers are not lucid all the time or throughout REM sleep.
Expanding the communication portal
- This disease, which causes involuntary sleep, sleep paralysis and an early onset of the REM phase, is associated with an increased propensity for lucid dreaming.
- We asked them to smile or frown to signal whether the word had been made up or not.
- Unsurprisingly, people with narcolepsy were able to respond when they were lucid in REM sleep, confirming our results from 2021.
- By refining the brain markers that predict the moments of connection with the outside world, it should be possible to further optimise communication protocols in the future.
Les auteurs ne travaillent pas, ne conseillent pas, ne possèdent pas de parts, ne reçoivent pas de fonds d'une organisation qui pourrait tirer profit de cet article, et n'ont déclaré aucune autre affiliation que leur organisme de recherche.
